Earlier today I realized that I had made a mistake. A very stupid mistake with expensive and tragic consequences. My employers are sending me to China to help with a sales trip; I’m going to give demonstrations of how to use our new engine Gamebryo LightSpeed. This evening I realized that my flight left this morning. For some reason I had been assuming for weeks that it left tomorrow. That’s a big mistake. I frantically tried to make new travel arrangements, but the earliest it is possible to arrive in Beijing at this point is half way through the seminar I’m supposed to be presenting in.

I don’t have any excuse for this; if I had just been slightly more dilligent I would have double checked the departure time and everything would be fine. Because I didn’t take some tiny bit of effort, the seminar won’t work out ideally and I have to go through this added expense (and stress) of making new travel plans. I don’t feel good about this; I actually feel physically ill.

Fortunately, there is a technical account manager already in China who can stand in for me, so not all is lost.

China

In other news, I get to go to China; that’s pretty cool. I’ll have a few days in the middle in Shanghai where I can hang out with my brother Dave and his family. I really thought I would have had more to say about this, but I really can’t get over that first bit of stuff I was talking about so I’ll just leave it at that.

Here is a screenshot that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about

Triangle Game Conference

The North Carolina Triangle area has put together a conference called the Triangle Game Conference. A friend of mine submitted a proposal that he and I would give a talk on benefits and organization of Game Jams and it got accepted. I get back from China in the morning and I’ll be presenting at the conference in the afternoon – it’s going to be super crazy!

Independent Game Festival

I forgot to mention this last time, but I recently got some feedback on my game Connexus from the Independent Game Festival judges that reviewed it. here is what it said:

"Promising and conceptually interesting – good luck with this project!" – 2009 Independent Games Festival Judge

Wow. Really? I actually would have been a lot happier not having recieved that feedback. At least then I could have continued under the illusion that the judge put more than 30 seconds worth of thought into my game before passing on it. That vague one sentence description could have applied to any entry in the entire festival.

Here’s another out of place screenshot

Games

When I went to the Game Developer’s Conference last month, I started playing Advance Wars 2 again – that’s a great game. It makes me want to make a strategy game. At home I’ve been playing Battle for Wesnoth again. It’s not nearly as good as Advance Wars 2 but has a lot of content and it’s free. Hooray strategy.